


The Aftermath

by TheSlothQueen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angry Dean Winchester, Angst, Coda, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Episode 15x18, Episode Spoilers, F/M, M/M, Minor Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, POV Sam Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, Swearing, castiel is gone, sam doesn't get it at first, this is the aftermath of that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:46:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27453700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSlothQueen/pseuds/TheSlothQueen
Summary: 15x18 CodaFirst, Sam doesn’t understand.And finally, Sam understands.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 23
Kudos: 327





	The Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> That destiel confession shook something loose in me. This is the first fic I've been able to finish in years. Guess I just needed to share my headcanon of the aftermath of 15x18.

Dean’s not answering. Sam and Jack have both been calling him for the entire two hours it takes to drive back to the bunker. Castiel’s phone is disconnected.

There are empty cars on the road, just standing there. They pass a few car wrecks, too. A lonely Tesla drives towards them, no one inside. The sight makes Sam’s stomach roil.

The bunker still stands there, unchanged. They hurry down the stairs, the wrought iron structure clanging at every step.

“Dean!” Sam’s voice echoes around the cavernous war room. He already knows there won’t be an answer, but the silence still comes as a punch to the gut. “Cas!”

They move along the corridors, check both Dean’s bedroom and the room Castiel usually uses, but they are empty and so is the kitchen and the shower rooms.

Jack keeps calling Dean’s phone, and as they run towards the dungeon, Sam begins to hear a quiet vibrating sound.

The dungeon door is open. The sound is getting louder. Sam bursts inside, and there, leaning against the side wall, is his brother, with his head in his hands.  Cas is nowhere to be seen.

“Dean, hey, Dean!” Sam says, drops down on his knees in front of his brother, shakes him. There are no visible wounds he can see, no pool of blood anywhere. Just a bloody hand print on Dean’s shoulder.

Dean looks up, sluggish. His eyes don’t seem to focus properly. Still, relief courses through Sam, leaving him weak

“Sam?” Dean’s voice is rough. His eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed; he looks like he had been on a three-day drinking binge.

“Dean, you okay? Are you hurt? Why didn’t you answer the phone?” Sam pushes Dean’s arms down, man-handles Dean until he can get a better look at his body. There are no wounds, no signs of any damage.

“Yeah,” Dean says, looking down at his own body, like he isn’t quite certain if there is something wrong. “There was… my heart. Billie had my heart, but Cas made it go away.”

Sam peers deeper into Dean’s eyes. “Did you hit your head?” he asks because Dean sounds seriously out of it.

“No?” Dean asks.

Jack comes closer, kneels beside Dean. “Where’s Cas?” he asks, his voice sounding small and scared.

A grimace passes over Dean’s face, making his facial muscles convulse like he is having a seizure.

“Gone. The Empty came and took him. Him and Billie both.” Dean’s voice breaks down and his breath hitches. The wetness in his eyes rises and spills, falls down his cheeks, and he doesn’t even try to hide it.

“How did… how did the Empty get here?” Sam asks. Dean just stares at him like he doesn’t understand the question and shakes his head. Or maybe his whole body is shaking.

“Can it come back? Should we… should we set up wards? Wait, it had to be summoned, right? Maybe we can use it, summon it back here… What spell did you use?” Sam’s mind is spinning, desperately seeking for hope, looking for solutions. Maybe they could set the Empty against Chuck. Or slip in, get Cas back, wake up all the other angels and use them as an army?

Sam looks around, but there are no signs of runes or any spell ingredients.

“Dean, come on, how did the Empty get here?” He shakes his brother gently, trying to force Dean to focus.

“Cas. Cas… summoned it,” Dean says and wraps his arms around his stomach, lurching forward.

“Yeah, okay, but how?”

“His deal,” Jack says, sudden and loud. Dean flinches.

“What deal?” Sam asks.

“It was his deal, wasn’t it?” Jack inches closer to Dean, sets his hand on Dean’s arm, below the red hand print on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Dean says, so high and quiet that it sounds like the whine of a wounded animal.

“What deal?” Sam asks again, and he would really appreciate it if he didn’t have to keep repeating himself in a situation like this.

“When I died and went to heaven, the Empty came to find me. It wanted to take me because it believed I belonged to it. But Castiel… he knew that the Empty wanted him more than me. He made a deal. His life for mine,” Jack says.

Dean lurches forward again and lets out a dry sob, burying his head in his arms.

“But…” Sam starts.

“But there was a twist,” Jack speaks over him. “The Empty didn’t want to take him right away. It wanted to make it hurt. So, it said that it will only come when Castiel finally allows himself to be happy.”

“What?” Sam asks. “What the hell did he have to be happy about? Hunted by both Death and God? With people disappearing left and right?”

He has more to say, but Dean lets out a broken sound, hunching into an even smaller ball. Tremors shake his entire body.

“Come on, Dean, snap out of it,” Sam says. He knows it’s harsh, Dean just lost his best friend, again, but so did Sam. And he lost Eileen. And watched almost everyone he cared about vanish into thin air. There’s just no time for Dean’s breakdown.

“This doesn’t make any sense, Dean. What did Cas do?” he asks and grasps at Dean’s arm, tries shaking him again. Dean does not even react.

“Sam,” Jack says. When Sam turns to look, the boy has that peculiar look on his face that he sometimes gets. Like he is something ancient and larger than Sam can ever start to comprehend.

He has never looked more like Castiel than in that moment.

Jack just shakes his head at him, once, almost as if warning him. Then he turns away and leans closer to Dean again.

“Dean. Dean, can you get up?” he says, low and quiet. Soothing.

“What?” Dean’s voice is raw.

“Can you get up? You need to get up.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, but he needs both Sam and Jack’s help to get up and grimaces in pain when he straightens up. Has he really been sitting there more than two hours?

“That’s good, Dean,” Jack says. “Let’s get you out of here.”

They hobble along the corridor painfully slowly. Dean keeps shaking so violently that his teeth chatter, and Sam is starting to grow more and more worried.

This is not his brother.

“Dean, I think you are in shock. We need to get you warm, okay?” Jack says to Dean, and Sam wants to snap at the boy, tell him not to baby Dean, warn him that Dean will bite his head off.

“Yeah,” Dean just says in a small voice.

Fuck, he really is in shock. Sam feels instant regret for being so harsh earlier. He has never seen Dean like this, but it’s no excuse: even Jack realized before him, and the boy can’t even tie his shoelaces yet.  


“He should have a warm shower,” Jack says, “but we can’t leave him alone.”

“Yeah, I’ll help him,” Sam says. The walk across the bunker seems to take hours, but finally they manage to half-carry Dean into the bathroom. “I’ll take care of him. Maybe you could warm up some soup for us, yeah? There should be a few cans in the pantry.”

“Okay,” Jack says and leaves after one last glance at Dean.

“Hey, let’s get you out of these clothes, yeah?” Sam says as kindly as he can.

“Yeah,” Dean says and starts pulling at his clothes with clumsy fingers. Sam helps him out of his jacket and Dean’s eyes become nailed at it, nailed at the bloody hand print decorating the shoulder.

“I’ll get it clean, don’t worry,” Sam says.

Dean’s arm shots out from nowhere, his fingers wrapping around Sam’s throat, pressing against his windpipe with crushing force.

“Don’t you fucking dare to touch it,” he growls and yanks the jacket from Sam’s lax fingers’, cradling it against his chest with his free hands.

“Hey, hey, okay, I won’t. I won’t, Dean, please,” Sam wheezes, and Dean looks at him and his own hand in confusion.

Dean releases him.

Sam gasps for air for a few seconds. Dean doesn’t even look at him, eyes on the jacket again.

It’s not Dean’s own hand print, Sam realizes. It’s a last goodbye from Cas.

“Come on, then. Let’s put the jacket away and get you in the shower,” Sam says. His voice shakes.

Dean sets the jacket aside like it is a bottle of finest whisky and then continues to tug his clothes off. They get Dean down to his boxers, and that is how Sam ushers him under the warm spray.

Sam stands there, just outside the shower, and watches as his brother just stays there, rigid and unmoving, letting the water cascade over him.

They stand there for a long time, minutes ticking by, and slowly, so slowly, Dean starts to droop, leaning forward until his forehead is pressed against the tiles. He starts to cry with harsh, dry sobs that echo around the bathroom.

“He’s gone, Sammy. He’s gone,” Dean sobs. Sam reaches a hesitant hand into the shower and squeezes Dean’s arm.

“I know, man. I know.”

What Sam doesn’t say is that Cas has been gone before. That Dean should be used to this by now. Castiel leaves. It is what he does. Dean himself has said it. Cas also tends to find his way back.

“And I didn’t. I didn’t,” Dean says, quieter.

“Didn’t what?” Sam asks, but Dean just shakes his head. He shuts off the shower and hands out his hand for a towel.

Sam hopes that the worst is now over, that they can get back to business, but when Dean looks at Sam, his eyes are empty and devoid of his usual fire. Dead.

Jack has left a set of pajamas and Dean’s robe outside the door. Sam hands them to Dean, who doesn’t need his help putting them on, although his moves are slow and pained, like an old man’s.

They go to the kitchen. Jack has managed to heat up a pot of soup without exploding anything, which is a first. They eat in silence. Jack keeps looking between Sam and Dean, though his eyes seem to rest on Dean more often. Sam barely tastes the soup. Dean’s movements are mechanical, efficient. A soldier eating his rations. At least the food brings back some color to his face, makes him look less like a walking corpse.

When the food is gone, Sam makes coffee, and it is not until they are all holding their mugs that he turns back to Dean.

“I know you’re hurting, Dean, and I’m sorry. Cas… losing Cas is hard on all of us. But we need you back in the game, Dean. We are the only ones left. They are all gone. Everyone.”

“What?” Dean asks.

“We are the last people in the world,” Jack says and Dean turns his shocked eyes to him.

“They’re all dead?”

“Not dead. Gone. Like Cas, except we don’t know where Chuck took all the people,” Sam says and pretends he doesn’t see the way Dean flinches at Cas’s name.

“Actually,” Jack says, “I think they could all be in the Empty.”

“What, how?” Sam frowns. “That’s for angels, right?”

“Chuck has demolished all the other worlds. I… I think I would have felt it if he had created something completely new. He would not put them in heaven, either. Rowena hasn’t sent us word of humans in hell. Empty is the only place left.”

They all stare at each other.

If Dean were himself, he’d take this moment to say something about things becoming a little bit too easy now that they only needed to fight god and overpower a primordial, cosmic goo-monster to save all the people in the world, but he isn’t and Sam does not have quite the same way with words than his brother does.

“So, I guess we really need to get to the Empty now,” Sam says instead and waits for Dean to say his piece. And waits. And waits.

“Dean. We really need to know what happened with Cas. How did that whole thing go down?”

Dean closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You don’t. You don’t. It won’t work again. It was the deal he made. The… the moment of true happiness.”

“But how? I mean, I’ve never seen Cas happy. Dude’s miserable. You were in a frigging dungeon, Dean, apparently with Death right on your heels. What made him so damn happy?” Sam can’t let this go, he  _ needs _ to know, needs to find out if there is even the slightest chance of getting them all back, getting Eileen and Cas and Charlie and Donna back…

Dean shoots up from his chair. He throws his coffee cup across the kitchen. It shatters against the wall, splattering black coffee and white pieces of porcelain everywhere.

“You wanna know what made him so fucking happy, Sammy, huh? You really want to know? Loving me! That’s what made him happy. Just loving me, just telling me he loves me, and never, ever expecting anything in return. Cause that’s Cas. A fucking self-sacrificing son of a bitch with a fucking _impeccable_ timing.”

Sam can do nothing but sit there and stare as Dean paces the kitchen, his hands buried in his hair. Tears are streaming across his cheeks again.

“And you know what I did? You know what I did? I just STOOD there like a fucking useless MUTE piece of shit and WATCHED Cas being dragged into this fucking slimy black void in the wall. I did what I fucking do best, which is fucking NOTHING.”

Dean falls on his knees, curls into himself and presses his hands against his mouth, trying to muffle an anguished, broken cry that breaks out of him like a blade slashing through flesh.

And finally, Sam understands.

The last decade of their lives shifts, tilts on its axis, and settles down again; a little more tragic, a little more beautiful.

He’s out of his chair before he realizes he has moved. Then he is on his knees next to his brother, wrapping his arms around Dean’s taut, shaking shoulders.

“I'm so sorry, Dean. I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

And now Sam is crying, too, for Dean and Cas, for Eileen and himself, for Jack, who is hovering beside them, lost and scared. Sam gestures him to come closer, pulls him into their shared grief.

“We will get them all back,” Sam murmurs. “Cas and Eileen and Charlie and Donna and Bobby. We will get them all back.”

Dean just shakes his head.

We will, Sam swears silently.

__

_ We will. _


End file.
